www.elsblog.org - Bringing Data and Methods to Our Legal Madness

26 September 2006

Doctor(s) in the House

The ability of law professors to produce ELS depends in large part on educational background and training. I opted to include social science doctorates, as a percentage of faculty, as one measure of an institution’s likely role in and commitment to ELS. Social science Ph.D. programs typically require course work in methodology, statistical analysis, and research design. The presence of social scientists also should increase the opportunities for non-social science colleagues to engage in empirical work through informal or formal collaboration.

This proxy required three decisions: First, which professors to include? I wanted to focus on research faculty; therefore, the database includes any tenure-track, non-emeritus, full-time professor whose primary appointment is at the law school. Second, what constitutes a social science for this measure? Beyond the obvious, I added degrees that include the methods training associated with the social sciences. Third, where to locate the information? My research assistants and I looked at the AALS directory as well as each law school’s webpage.

The top 20 schools (with percentage in parentheses) are listed below:

1. Northwestern (36.7%)

2. George Mason (29.0%)

3. UC-Berkeley (28.6%)

4. Pennsylvania (27.9%)

5. Stanford (23.5%)

6. Yale (21.8%)

7. Chicago (18.5%)

8. Wisconsin and Michigan (17.5%)

10. USC (16.7%)

11. Cornell (15.8%)

12. Vanderbilt (15.4%)

13. Illinois (15.0%)

14. UCLA (12.8%)

15. NYU (11.5%)

16. Columbia and Emory (11.1%)

18. North Carolina (10.3 %)

19. UC-Hastings (8.2%)

20. Florida (8.1%)

Are these results what you expected? Which school did you expect to be higher given its interdisciplinary reputation? Are you surprised that Harvard is missing from the top 20? Does its absence possibly indicate that a percentage is not the right measure here? (Harvard is 13th overall in the number of social scientists.) How will these numbers shift in the next few years?

(If you believe a number is in error, please let me know which number and why.)

Comments

Are you surprised that Harvard is missing from the top 20? Does its absence possibly indicate that a percentage is not the right measure here? (Harvard is 13th overall in the number of social scientists.) How will these numbers shift in the next few years?

1) I imagine you will address this point later in the week, but the PhD arguably supplies the tools to do empirical work. To see if PhD's are indeed a good predictor of ELS output, we need to operationalize some measure of empirical work--very difficult analytically and logistically. Otherwise, the counting of PhD's is primarily a beauty contest. Note that Caron & Gely (2004) found no relationship between graduate degrees and quality/quantity of output. Those results could have been a product of criterion used and the simple methodology (paired t-tests). But maybe not.

2) Your original Ind L J article on ELS rankings defined empirical as primarily quantitative in nature. The narrowness of that concept--which was, I think, widely shared by many in the legal academy--has come up repeatedly on this blog, most pointedly by Howard Gillman, Beth Mertz, Bob Nelson, and Stewart MacCauley. Have you rethought whether your methodology should include qualitative social science methods?